“And how did you find out in the end what was wrong?” asked John Cotterell, when the students had all left the room.
“The usual way. One morning while I was still in bed I started to cough, and when I put my hand in front of my mouth, it got stained with blood. Then I found I couldn’t stop coughing and suddenly blood started to stream out.”
“Was it very much?”
“It must have been. Everything seemed to get covered in it.”
John Cotterell stretched himself lazily; the Alpine sun had transmuted the fawn-coloured wallpaper into sheets of gold. The only sound came from the choukas, gull-like birds in jesuitical black, ridiculous and ungainly in their walk, superb in their flight. Squawking angrily and disconsolately, they wheeled about the balconies of Les Alpes, or, grouped together in great clouds (which resembled the myriad of germ cells revealed by a microscope in a drop of contaminated water), soared in a communal flight about a distant mountain.
The snow which had formed on the balcony soon melted; the summits of the mountains, clustered together as thickly as sand dunes, shone with an electric radiance. It seemed foolish to lie in bed when outside it was so warm. Accordingly John and Paul got up and transferred a few blankets on to the wooden chaises longues, and, covering their bodies with their bedclothes, lay back with the rays of the sun streaming full upon them.
Lying thus in the sun one is liberated from doubts and from misgivings; it is not that problems and difficulties are resolved, it is that they are banished. The sun’s radiation penetrates the mind as well as the body, anæsthetising thought, suppressing progressively all disharmony of spirit until the dulled but ecstatic brain vibrates with a continual shimmer of pleasure.
The young men were not to experience their sense of well-being for very long. “Nom de pipe!” cried a voice, and Sœur Jeanne, her face taut with horror and indignation, came running on to the balcony. “Oh, mon Dieu, que vous êtes fous! Who told you you could lie out there?” She grasped the corners of the blankets on each chaise longue and dragged them back into the room. “Listen,” she said, as both John and Paul followed her, “for you the sun is death. For the rest of your lives you will never be able to support the full sunlight. You do not understand what it means to be ill, you carry on just like children. Why, in one hour the sun can open lesions on the lung which have already healed, and in no time you can start a fresh evolution. One day Dr. Vernet may allow you out on the balcony with the sun-blind lowered, and”—turning towards Paul—“for you at least, mon cher, that will not happen for a long time.”
The rebuke, justified and unanswerable, was offered and accepted; at the same time it served as an initiation into the status which illness imposes on the individual. John and Paul looked embarrassed and apologetic; Sœur Jeanne, feeling perhaps that she had been over-harsh, modified her severity and explained that she was not angry on her own account but purely for the good of her new charges, who in future must co-operate, and not be ‘de mauvais garçons’.
She then explained that she had come to fetch Paul, who was to have an X-ray and a medical examination. She helped him on with his shabby grey dressing-gown and then hurried him down the passage to the lift, a garish and rickety bird-cage which groaned and trembled its way between the floors.
The Service Médical was on the fourth floor—to enter it one had to pass through a white door with a glazed glass panel. One then found oneself in a narrow corridor, smelling strongly of ether. Lining each side were doors on various of which were painted: ‘Salle d’Attente’, ‘Rayons’, ‘Médecin Chef’, ‘Bureau’, ‘Département de Larynchologie’, and most ominously, ‘Salle d’Interventions’.
“You wait here while I tell them that you have come,” said Sœur Jeanne, and she knocked at the door of the bureau, entered and closed it behind her. Paul experienced an access of nervous excitement which drained the strength from his legs; he leant against the wall to stop himself from swaying. He felt as though he were swinging a great wheel into motion, which, once turning, would carry him with it. His instinct was to run, to quit, whilst still able, this hygienic, aseptic world on top of the mountains.
The opening of a door behind him. The emergence of a white-coated figure. The glimpse of a face without colour surmounted by a thick tuft of ginger hair; the whole expanse of hair dramatically substituted for the face as the figure hinged at the centre in a bow. Then the hand, candle-white, produced like an unexpected gift and extended towards Paul. A gesture in lieu of a verbal summons; another bow; and Paul passed through the doorway.
“I am Dr. Bruneau, deputy Médecin Chef. I speak no English. Do you speak French?”
“Very badly,” replied Paul.
“Good. You will soon learn—necessity is the best tutor. Sit down.”
Very lean, with swift, pouncing movements, a disproportionately large head and hard, green eyes, Dr. Bruneau looked like a starveling ginger cat dressed up in a white jacket, a figure from a children’s postcard of the turn of the century: a firm jaw and a loose mouth, high cheek-bones tightly covered by transparent flesh, ginger eyebrows pointed at the corners like the ends of a sergeant-major’s moustache, wiry, rippling hair as unmanageable as a handful of uncoiled springs.
Sitting down at a desk, he motioned to Paul to draw his chair nearer, then, taking a file-cover, he opened it and started to write inside. At one moment he stopped and searched for some papers from a drawer; as he read he grunted and nodded, occasionally directing a glance of curiosity towards Paul. At last he put down his pen.
“Alors, cher monsieur, we will begin our acquaintance by learning a few particulars about you. Your parents are both living?”
“Dead.”
“Ah, voilà!” said he with the satisfaction of a man who has just located the missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle.
Sensing a misunderstanding, Paul added quickly: “They died in a car accident when I was two years old.”
“A car accident! Tiens! Then they were not ill?”
“No. They were perfectly healthy.”
“Then which members of your family had tuberculosis?”
“None. I am the first.”
“That, monsieur,” said Dr. Bruneau, waving his pen at Paul, “you do not know. Many are ill and never know it. I have a theory …. However …”
He now posed a number of questions about Paul’s occupation and background, repeating the answers as he wrote them. He spoke with a curious distinctness, and in such a way as to leave no doubt as to the intended punctuation, a consequence, probably, of many conversations with invalids whose knowledge of French was rudimentary.
“Monsieur,” he demanded suddenly, and almost as if with the object of catching Paul off his guard, “have you ever spat blood?” Paul nodded. “How many times?” “Only once.” (It was now the question and answer of the confessional.) “It was much?” “Yes.” “Ah. It is all written down here,” said Dr. Bruneau, looking at a sheet of typewritten paper from which earlier he had been copying.
He then inquired about the nature of past symptoms and the events which had led to diagnosis, until with confusion and fatigue Paul’s French became incomprehensible. Either because he now had sufficient information, or because he realised that he could extract no more, Dr. Bruneau closed the file, and then subjected Paul to a thorough physical examination.
“Eh bien, now I will screen your chest.” He led Paul through an inter-communicating door to the adjoining room; its ceiling was vaulted, there were no windows, the air was heavy and the only illumination was provided by a dim, blue-tinted electric bulb. Machines of complex construction towered obscurely beyond what was discernible of their façades. It was as though the workshop of Dr. Coppelius had been resurrected in the catacombs.
Dr. Bruneau seated himself on a music stool in the middle of the floor, and, lowering his head, clasped his hands over his eyes. Paul, who had no idea that Dr. Bruneau was merely accustoming his eyes to the darkness before attempting to distinguish the ill-defined shadows which would be projected on to the screen of the X-ray machine, stood motionless and perplexed; he felt like a visitor who, having come to inspect the interior of a cathedral, has found a service actually in progress.
“Now take off your jacket and step into this cabinet,” said Dr. Bruneau, pointing with one hand, whilst retaining the other over his eyes. Paul dropped his jacket on to a chair and climbed cautiously into a wooden structure shaped like an up-ended coffin. He heard the sound of the music stool being dragged across the floor. Then Dr. Bruneau’s voice, slightly muffled but very close, ordered him to stand forward with his chest against the screen. Paul shivered as his flesh came into contact with the cold glass. “Now your hands on your hips and elbows forward”; a panel opened in the front of the machine, and Dr. Bruneau’s hand was inserted to guide Paul’s inexperienced movements. The resultant tactual sensation was one of great intimacy; it was as though two people buried alive by an explosion had found each other.
A click as Dr. Bruneau pressed a switch with his foot; the dim light was extinguished, and Paul heard for the first time the characteristic buzzing of the X-ray apparatus, a sound as insistent and directionless as if a bee had been imprisoned in the orifice of each ear.
“Lean backwards. Lean forwards. Turn half about,” ordered Dr. Bruneau. “Now back again. Halt! Breathe in. Breathe out. Stay like that.” The buzzing stopped. “Don’t move. I will now fetch Dr. Vernet.” The opening, closing, opening, closing of a door, and then the Médecin Chef of Les Alpes was also peering at Paul Davenant’s shadowy interior. The two doctors conferred in whispers; Paul sought desperately to catch a significant word, but without success. The blue light was turned on, and he was told to leave the cabinet.
“Je vous présente le Docteur Vernet,” said Dr. Bruneau, and Paul bowed slightly to a white-coated figure. “Enchanté, monsieur,” said Dr. Vernet, shaking Paul’s hand. “Come now into my bureau. After having viewed the interior of a patient, I like always to see his exterior—if only for the purpose of co-ordination.” Dr. Vernet’s English was mannered but fluent, and, although he spoke with a marked accent, it was unidentifiable.
“Mais je n’ai pas encore fait la radiographie,” objected Dr. Bruneau.
“Bien. Faites-la vite. J’ai tous le temps, comme toujours,” said Dr. Vernet mildly.
When the X-ray had been taken, Dr. Vernet led Paul into his bureau, and both men regarded each other in the light. Dr. Vernet was a little above middle height, and in his late forties. His body was thick, he had a short neck and firm, round features. His eyes were alert and very intelligent. On the apex of his left cheek was a small mole which compelled attention whenever the angle of his face brought it into view. His smile was so broad that it caused his cheeks to bulge and the thin line of his lips to extend to twice its normal length.
Suddenly, and with no change of expression, he seized Paul’s hand, as though with the object of shaking it a second time; instead he turned it over and examined the fingernails, even running the tip of his own finger very delicately over their surface. “Mais vous voyez …” he murmured to Dr. Bruneau.
“And now I auscult you,” he said. And as he sounded Paul’s chest, he repeated: “Breathe deeply. Cough. Say trente-trois.” When the stethoscope moved fairly rapidly, Paul felt relieved; when it lingered in any particular area, he was filled with apprehension.
When Dr. Vernet had covered the whole terrain, he directed Dr. Bruneau to take a stethoscope and to follow his own from one point to another, and each time Paul felt the pressure of the two instruments, he breathed deeply, coughed and said trente-trois.
“Bien. Allez chercher Florent,” said Dr. Vernet at last. Dr. Bruneau left the room to return shortly with a young doctor of most timid aspect. “Come, Florent,” said Dr. Vernet, giving Paul the smile of a confederate. “Come and give us your opinion of the condition of Monsieur Davenant.” And, still smiling, he seated himself on the corner of his desk whilst Dr. Florent ran his stethoscope over Paul’s chest, telling him at the same time to breathe deeply, to cough and to say trente-trois.
Paul stared at the opposite wall; he felt dehumanised and exhausted. The pitch of his voice was unrecognisable as, every few seconds, he cried out: “Trente-trois.”
“A little quicker, Florent; Monsieur Davenant is getting tired, I think,” said Dr. Vernet, and as Dr. Florent started to stammer a diagnosis, he cried: “Halte! Ça suffit.” Then, turning towards Paul and still smiling, he announced: Monsieur, you have many cavities and lesions at the base of your left lung, and infiltrations at the apex. On the upper lobe of your right lung there are a number of minor infiltrations. I will have to reflect upon your case before I decide what treatment to attempt. In any case you will return to bed and remain there, for you are too ill to be up.”
The consultation was over and the doctors were about to withdraw. “Excuse me,” said Paul hurriedly; he felt lonely and abashed in his sickness and his semi-nudity. “Excuse me, but how long do you think I shall have to stay here?”
Dr. Bruneau glanced over his shoulder: “You should know, monsieur, that this is not the sort of place to which you come for three weeks.”
“Yes, yes, of course. All I ask is the very least idea.”
“Monsieur, we are doctors—not prophets,” replied Dr. Bruneau, as he hastened after his colleagues.
When Paul returned to his room he found it empty, for everyone was at lunch. He was glad that he would miss the meal, glad that he was alone, glad that in quietness he could climb back into bed. But as soon as he lay down he had a bad attack of coughing, and then for several minutes could not clear his throat. At last, completely exhausted, he lay back and shut his eyes.
He fell instantly into that sort of half-sleep in which thoughts and memories, heightened by the partially hallucinatory perception engendered by a tubercular fever, become synthesised in a specious impression of reality. “Excuse me,” he had once said, somewhere, for some reason; occasions, possible, half-remembered, drifted across his memory. “Excuse me” to people he had inadvertently jostled, “Excuse me” as a preamble to uncongenial explanation, “Excuse me” to the blockers of doorways and passages through which he had wanted to pass …
Doorways and passages …. He reviewed and re-saw them, familiar, forgotten structures, each with its grey associations. Doorways were quickly passed, passages stretched far as the imagination: the narrow, unilluminated passage of a block of flats in which he had once lived, the wooden passage of an army ‘spider’ leading to a disinfectant-drenched wash-house, the bare, discoloured passage of School House …
The associations fell into alignment. School House, the fagging duty bungled, the prefect who seemed twice his size, the eternity in the passage, then “I’ll see you later”. “Excuse me,” Paul had said, knowing already the answer, but impelled by panic to imprudence, “excuse me, but what are you going to do to me?”
He woke with his face covered with sweat, and, as he wiped it away, he saw that the pillow was soaked. The sweat returned to his forehead, and his pyjama jacket stuck to his back. He looked incredulously at his watch; only five minutes had passed since he had last consulted it. He took a brush and comb from the table de nuit, but as he started to brush his moist hair they got entangled in it and fell from between his fingers. Before he could attempt to retrieve them, he heard the sound of footsteps and the voices of the British students; the door opened and they all came in.
“What are you doing in bed? Why weren’t you at lunch?” demanded Angus Gray, who was the first into the room. Paul explained that he had had his medical examination, and had been told to return to bed.
“Have you had your lunch?” asked John Cotterell.
“Yes,” lied Paul.
“You’re looking very flushed,” commented John MacAllister. “How did you get on with your medical examination?”
Paul, who was now sitting up in bed, shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? What did they say to you?”
“That I was ill.”
“Brilliant diagnosis! Nothing contagious, I hope?”
“Oh no!”
“‘A wee bit chesty,’ as they say up our way,” said Angus Gray.
“Certainly no more than that.”
“I should hope not. I wouldn’t stay here a minute if I thought otherwise,” said William Davis.
“Nor would I,” said Paul, amidst laughter.
“You’re all taking it very lightly,” commented David Bean. He sat down on a chair and raised his feet on to Paul’s bed.
Everyone looked at him in surprise.
“Well, how do you think we should take it?” demanded John MacAllister.
“A little more realistically.” David Bean turned to Paul. “Yesterday you were shooting your mouth off about one of the great advantages of T.B. being that it was painless. I wondered at the time whether you had ever seen anyone dying of T.B. Have you?”
Paul shook his head.
“Well, then, I advise you to reserve your judgement.”
“I didn’t make a judgement. I merely said that if I must have a disease, I preferred it to be painless.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“Precisely.”
“Which is just the reason for not choosing T.B.”
For a moment there was silence. Then Paul said very deliberately: “Well, David, if you’re in a lot of pain I must confess you’re disguising the fact very courageously.”
“You think so. Maybe.”
“In fact you give the impression of being in as little pain as I am.”
“As little pain …” cried David Bean. His face turned scarlet, and his whole body began to tremble. “What in God’s name do you know about pain, you who are only beginning? Do you think there is no pain in rotting in your bed for years until one day you drown in your own blood? Do you think that there’s no pain in knowing you’re a pariah? Do you think there’s no pain in having to apologise for your sickly presence everywhere you go, in being shunned by your friends because they think you a plague-carrier, in being afraid to kiss a girl in case she finds out that you’ve got T.B.? Do you think that there’s no pain in being confined to your own knife, fork, spoon and plate when you’re eating in the house of your own parents? Do you think——” he paused to take breath.
“Well done! Bean’s potted guide to T.B. Of course you’re speaking from years of personal experience,” said John MacAllister sarcastically.
“If you want to know, both my brothers died from T.B. I nursed them and now I’ve caught it myself.”
“I see. I’m sorry.”
Paul said very quietly: “That’s pretty bad luck, David. But it doesn’t mean that we’re all going to die. I can tell you that I, for one, intend to get completely cured.”
David Bean was not placated, and he replied in a measured and remorseless tone: “The first thing, Davenant, that you can get out of your head is the idea of being completely cured. Nobody who gets touched by the tubercle can ever get completely cured. The best thing that you can hope for is to obtain some compromise with the bug which will enable you to live with it on fairly amicable terms.”
“What absolute nonsense!” cried John MacAllister. “With collapse therapy it is possible to cure it definitively.”
David Bean’s eyes narrowed contemptuously. “I refer you to your textbooks,” he said. “In my second year of medicine I assimilated one principle concerning T.B., and I have seen its vindication ever since. It is this: T.B. is a general disease with local symptoms which may appear anywhere in the body. By various methods you may clear up the local symptoms; the disease itself you will never touch.”
“You’re out of date, man,” said Angus Gray, also a medical student. “Our surgeons have long ago shown that fiction up. The danger from T.B. is in the symptoms, not in the disease, and when the symptoms are overcome the disease itself often has a mysterious way of packing up of its own accord. I’ve seen people die as a result of pulmonary cavitation, but never from a general disease exhibiting no local symptoms!”
“Splendid! How very encouraging for the surgeons. But I seem to have come across a surprisingly large number of cases where local symptoms have been suppressed by some form of collapse therapy, only to break out in another part of the lung or somewhere else in the body.”
“I don’t know what you mean by collapse therapy, but it’s common knowledge that countless people got over T.B. long before any sort of treatment existed,” interjected Paul.
“They probably didn’t have T.B. Every wasting disease was once called consumption,” said David Bean.
“André Gide had T.B., and seriously enough to be considered a hopeless case. Nevertheless without going near a sanatorium he managed to clear it up some fifty years ago. And then again, Somerset Maugham doesn’t seem to be getting on too badly,” replied Paul.
“A pity that Keats, Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and a few others couldn’t have found out the secret,” came acidly from David Bean.
“And a pity, as you’ve decided to decline and drown in your own blood, that you couldn’t have done it at home instead of coming out here,” said William Davis.
“But I haven’t decided to,” replied David Bean coldly, “and I am effecting just that compromise with the bug about which I was speaking. The fact that I am managing very nicely was confirmed by Vernet when he examined me this morning. In any case I’ve never had any more than a faint shadow at the apex of my right lung, and it has now gone completely. But I’ve no illusions about the permanency of my recovery, despite the fact that Vernet insists that I am quite well. It is my intention to consolidate my improvement, and that will not be by running about the mountains. I shall spend as much time as I can in bed, and the next ten years of my life (if I have the good luck to avoid complications and relapses) I shall pass very quietly indeed.”
“What a revolting prospect! I should prefer to be dead,” said John MacAllister.
“Which is just the alternative available to you—choose as you wish. In any case, I have chosen. I——” David Bean broke off as the door opened and in came Sœur Jeanne.
“Two o’clock,” she cried, “It is the cure de silence. For two hours you must all get right into bed, and you may not talk or read or do anything. Now get along and don’t make a noise. Bonne cure, tout le monde!”
As the young men got up to leave, they ceremoniously wished each other “bonne cure”, and laughed heartily having done so. But “bonne cure” was a joke which, subjected to repetition by all new patients, tended to stale with the passage of time.
The late afternoon saw the departure of Mr. James. He came into the room shared by John Cotterell and Paul Davenant at the end of the cure de silence, and found, as he had anticipated, that the other students were also assembled there. His mood was both truculent and sentimental. First of all there was a bun for everybody. He opened a paper bag, which he handed round from student to student, delivering at the same time cautions and admonitions. (“Go easy lads, one each,” and a flood of indignant banter when John Cotterell pulled out a bun to which another was attached.)
While everyone was eating, he related a curious incident which had occurred when he had been taking leave of M. Halfont. Not having sufficient French money, but wishing to give M. Halfont a tip, he had pressed a packet of cigarettes and half a crown into his hand, explaining that he could undoubtedly change the latter coin at the bank. M. Halfont had examined the cigarette packet and the half crown, and had then handed them back to Mr. James, saying: “Thank you for showing me. They were very nice.” Mr. James, touched by M. Halfont’s unworldliness, had explained that they were a tip, at which M. Halfont, despite the fact that he seemed to understand English, had turned and walked down the passage. Mr. James had followed him, trying to explain in French, but it was useless. “Which,” as Mr. James pointed out, “just goes to show that their English is not always as good as they like to make out.”
Then Mr. James had had an interview with Dr. Vernet, and a fact of great significance had emerged from it, which under no circumstances had he the right to reveal to the students. But … The door opened and Sœur Jeanne entered, and Mr. James seized a magazine lying on a bed, opened it at hazard, and started ostentatiously to read aloud. When she had left again, Mr. James signalled to everyone to gather about him.
“More news about foreign students?” asked John MacAllister.
“Shut your mouth, Scottie,” said Mr. James tartly.
“Dr. Vernet also refused his tip?” suggested John Cotterell.
“For crying out loud!”
“Well, what is it that you mustn’t tell us?”
“You don’t bloody well deserve to know.”
“Well, tell us all the same,” pleaded John Cotterell.
“I shall do so—for the sake of the others,” said Mr. James with great dignity.
And he explained that he told Dr. Vernet that, although his responsibility had ended with the safe delivery of the British party to Brisset, he could not deny that he felt the keenest interest in their future. “What, frankly, and in complete confidence,” he had asked Dr. Vernet, “is their chance of ever getting out of here alive?” and Dr. Vernet had replied, after a moment’s reflection, that in his opinion all the members of the British party were curable!
“And I make this great breach of confidence purely for your peace of mind. If Dr. Vernet had made even one exception I would never so much as have breathed a word of it.” Then he commented that that afternoon he had provided not only mental nourishment, but also physical nourishment, for everybody had received and eaten a bun. Now it was his intention to provide a little spiritual nourishment. He did not know the religious views or denominations of any member of the party, and he wasn’t interested. For himself he couldn’t claim to be a great religious authority, and he didn’t mind admitting that he was very far from being a saint. But he had learned one thing, and he was going to pass it on for what it was worth—the power of prayer.
And he related an experience which had befallen him during the war. One evening there had been an air raid and he had heard the sound of a falling bomb, and he had known by a sort of second sight that it was coming straight for the house in which he was living. He had fallen on his knees and prayed as never before. There had been a terrible detonation, he had thought that he would be buried alive, but no … The bomb had fallen on the house next-door. “There,” said Mr. James, “was the power of prayer.”
“Was the house next-door occupied?” asked William Davis.
“A family of seven, not counting the lodgers, and all blown to smithereens,” said Mr. James impressively.
“And was your house badly damaged?”
“Not touched but for a couple of windows out at the back.”
And before the effect of his story could diminish he took from his pocket a packet of faded, paper-covered prayer books, and handed one to each student. They were headed in heavy type: ‘A Soldier’s Shortened Version of the Book of Common Prayer for Use in the Field’, and underneath appeared the date: ‘August 1914’. “A job lot—I picked them up at a ha’penny each on a stall in the Portobello Road,” explained Mr. James.
Time was getting short. It was not easy, he admitted, for him to leave them just as their period of trial was about to begin, and when in many ways they would most have need of him. But he believed that they would emerge chins up and banners flying; they would show the French that the British knew how to take it in peace as well as in war. One day they would all meet again, for preference and for old time’s sake outside the Foreign Departures platform at Victoria Station, and he would stand them all a dinner at any Soho restaurant they might care to name. Till then it was ‘watch and pray’; they would be in his thoughts.
Except for Paul, they all escorted Mr. James to the entrance hall, where last hand-shakes were cut short by the arrival of the concierge who was to conduct him to the station. Then the students returned to their rooms for the evening cure which lasted from half-past five till seven o’clock. When the cure was over, they found the passages full of baggage; it indicated the simultaneous arrivals of the French, Polish and Hungarian parties. Tomorrow, Sœur Jeanne told them, the parties from Italy, Czecho-slovakia and Greece were expected, whilst the last party—from Finland—was due at the end of the week.
Throughout the evening and night it snowed heavily.